I'm currently using https://intensedebate.com/ which, while abandonware, allows people to comment anonymously or using their Twitter & Facebook accounts.
How hard would it be to add non-Matrix accounts to this service?
Cactus Comments: Federated web comments based on Matrix protocol
21–30 of 57 posts
Re: Cactus Comments: Federated web comments based on Matrix protocol
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally find "hate speech" nomenclature quite tedious, but dealing with undesired content is handled via the usual Matrix methods[1]... since that is what underlies Cactus. You may have to self host though, i'm not sure if Cactus themselves give access to these features if you rely on them for hosting. [1] https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation
> I personally find "hate speech" nomenclature quite tedious I first encountered 'hate speech' as a wide eyed teenager in the 1990s on a gaming IRC room that I hung out in. Somehow my ethnic background came out, and it was bizarre: the entire room either turned against me with racist hate speech, adding that they knew where I lived based on my ip (didn't think this was possible, but then didn't know anyone to ask if…
I can't speak on behalf of ta8645, but it's possible that they support banning people who harass or threaten violence, but don't think that banning an ever growing list of ideologically chosen words will do much to solve the underlying problems (and may in fact exacerbate them).
Re: Cactus Comments: Federated web comments based on Matrix protocol
#23I'm currently using https://intensedebate.com/ which, while abandonware, allows people to comment anonymously or using their Twitter & Facebook accounts. How hard would it be to add non-Matrix accounts to this service?
Can't speak for the author about Cactus, but in my experience if you want to integrate with a lot of services for comments on your blog, you can use a widely-implemented protocol like webmention, along with a gateway like brid.gy for interfacing with centralized silos.
Unfortunately Facebook shut down the brid.gy gateway a few years ago, but other silos still interoperate fine.
Re: Cactus Comments: Federated web comments based on Matrix protocol
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally find "hate speech" nomenclature quite tedious, but dealing with undesired content is handled via the usual Matrix methods[1]... since that is what underlies Cactus. You may have to self host though, i'm not sure if Cactus themselves give access to these features if you rely on them for hosting. [1] https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation
> I personally find "hate speech" nomenclature quite tedious I first encountered 'hate speech' as a wide eyed teenager in the 1990s on a gaming IRC room that I hung out in. Somehow my ethnic background came out, and it was bizarre: the entire room either turned against me with racist hate speech, adding that they knew where I lived based on my ip (didn't think this was possible, but then didn't know anyone to ask if…
> So I wonder, to those who downvote someone asking about moderating
I didn't downvote and i'm certainly in favor of strong moderation. However automated filters worry me as they have shown time and time again that regexes aren't as sharp as human moderators.
For recent discussions about that on Lemmy, a federated Reddit replacement based on ActivityPub: https://lemmy.ml/post/55323 https://lemmy.ml/post/55143
Re: Cactus Comments: Federated web comments based on Matrix protocol
#25I'm excited about this - tried the demo, how do I know the site is not stealing my password? Shouldn't this use OAuth to solve that issue?
Because you don’t login via the site, you have to go through Matrix’ login flow, just like with any client.
Then why does the popup on Cactus ask for the password? If the matrix homeserver is responsible for the authentication, then cactus should probably only ask for a matrix identifier (user:server).
Re: Cactus Comments: Federated web comments based on Matrix protocol
#26Hello, i just tested it and it's really cool! Do you have any idea about ActivityPub / XMPP PubSub gateways for interoperability? From a remote look, it appears mxtoot is a bot not a proper AP gateway, and bifrost doesn't support PubSub XEP which is used for microblogging/commenting. Supporting these protocols directly would also be an option, but i don't know an ActivityPub server that supports guest accounts (but XMPP servers do).
Too bad cactus doesn't work without JavaScript. Would it be possible in the future to support submitting a comment via simple HTML form for older/slower clients? A related annoying detail, '?' key is hijacked by JavaScript so it's impossible to type it in the comment box ;-)
Thanks for this demo i'm excited for the future of federated comments
Re: Cactus Comments: Federated web comments based on Matrix protocol
#27This seems like an even better use of a state-synchronization protocol like Matrix than instant messaging, for which I think XMPP is a better fit.
It's not meant to be any one thing. That's its strength. Core to many usecases, many eyes, many industries' backing.
> It's not meant to be any one thing.
Well more so than other federated protocols. matrix has a strong emphasis on resistance to censorship and network splits, at the price of metadata leakage. In contrast, AP/XMPP assume every server is a tiny kingdom (no content is owned by more than one server). matrix usecase is really cool but could have been built on top of existing federated protocols without reinventing a new ecosystem.
Can't wait for proper interoperability between the three big federated networks (Matrix, XMPP, ActivityPub). The previous discussion on HN about this topic didn't go very far: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26279906
Re: Cactus Comments: Federated web comments based on Matrix protocol
#28Sidenote: The site has a small gotcha, in the demo page, if I type a text with a "?", when the question mark is typed the top right search field just gets activated and can't really type that character into the comment at all. It feels annoying user experience, though the actual comment service is great, checking whether I can use that on my site/blog instead of the current stuff.
Re: Cactus Comments: Federated web comments based on Matrix protocol
#29This seems like an even better use of a state-synchronization protocol like Matrix than instant messaging, for which I think XMPP is a better fit.
XMPP has been effectively dead for awhile. Time to move on.
Jabber/XMPP ecosystem is far from dead. If anything, my perspective as an end-user for quite a long time is there's been more community-oriented developments in the past few years, than in the entire previous decade.
Some clients/servers are unfortunately unmaintained and the XMPP Standards Foundation has a neutral position which prevents it from advertising specific clients which have good UX and modern features. But modern clients like Conversations, Dino, Siskin and Gajim are certainly good messengers with hardware and feature support i haven't seen in other ecosystems (client & server side low resource requirements, good Tor support client, and vast plugin ecosystems) though there's some dearly-missed functionality (eg. groups of chatrooms like matrix spaces).
If you're curious about interesting developments, libervia (ex salut-à-toi) is the only federated piece of software i know that is selfhosting its own development (forge). Tickets and merge requests for libervia are done via libervia itself. They've been doing that for almost 3 years now, using mercurial as a backend but implemented in a way that other DVCS backends can be supported. See my blogpost about decentralized forging for more context on that https://staticadventures.netlib.re/blog/decentralized-forge/
Re: Cactus Comments: Federated web comments based on Matrix protocol
#30I'm excited about this - tried the demo, how do I know the site is not stealing my password? Shouldn't this use OAuth to solve that issue?
You don't, you have to trust it just like any other Matrix client. Hopefully there will be OAuth or something similar in the Matrix spec in the future, so you can use less trusted clients. If you want to comment with your user, but don't trust the client, you can use any Matrix client with Cactus Comments by clicking "Use a Matrix client" :-)